The cheap labor capitalists on the Seattle Times editorial board are at it again:

THE comedian Louis C.K. has a brilliant rant about an airline passenger who bemoans problems with in-flight Internet. As Louis C.K. said, grumping about the airline Wi-Fi ignores the miracle of flight itself. “Everyone on every plane should just constantly be going, ‘Oh my God! Wow!’ You’re flying! You’re sitting in a chair, in the sky!”

We should all be impressed that the new generation of editors at this genteel family newspaper are young and hip enough to enjoy foul-mouthed Louis C.K.. Good for them. Though to be fair, from a consumer perspective, the airlines do suck way more than they have to, and as a technology, flying is no more magical than, say, electricity. So this is far from one of the comedian’s more brilliant rants.

Advocates pushing for a $15 minimum-wage are at a similar moment. The Seattle City Council, with backing from Mayor Ed Murray, is racing toward a radical economic policy that would have been unthinkable even a year ago.

Um, it was very thinkable even a year ago. In fact, a year ago, Kshama Sawant was running on a $15 minimum wage as the centerpiece of her insurgent Seattle City Council race at the same time organized labor was running a $15 minimum wage initiative in nearby SeaTac. And both of them won! That’s the very definition of “thinkable.” So I’m not sure why we should use the editors’ year-old paucity of imagination as an argument for watering down the measure now.

Yet Councilmember Kshama Sawant, and some of her allies in labor, are grumping about proposals to make this radical policy slightly more palatable for the business community.

“Grumping?” Really? Are they really equating defending the interests of working people with being grumpy? Maybe if Sawant just took a nap or something she’d stop sulking over efforts to pay teens and immigrants a sub-minimum wage… is that what the editors are implying? Remember: pro-worker = grumpy, pro-business = well rested! Way to infantilize the colored woman on the council, Seattle Times!

At the City Council’s first hearing on Murray’s $15 proposal last week, other council members pondered allowing a sub-minimum wage for 16- and 17-year-olds, as well as allowing a lower wage for a month or two of training.

Huh. How curiously nonspecific. A few paragraphs later the editors claim the sub-minimum wage is “usually defined as 85 percent of the standard wage,” but that’s not what state senate Republicans proposed last session. Their business-backed bill would have paid a training wage of 75 percent of the standard wage for the first 680 hours of work. That’s about four months of full time work. But as I explained at the time, it would pretty much mean that a college student working a part-time job would never earn the standard minimum wage.

Also screwed by a training wage would be every worker in high turnover industries like fast food and chain retail where annual turnover rates range up to 200 percent. With the typical worker getting no more than 30-hours a week, these jobs might never pay the full minimum wage. Which of course, is exactly the point.

The training wage idea is strongly backed by micro-businesses in Seattle’s ethnic minority community to facilitating training of new immigrants with limited English.

The teen wage idea acknowledges that employment rates for workers aged 16 to 19 in the Puget Sound have fallen by half since 2000, according to the Brookings Institution.

First, there is no correlation between teen employment and the minimum wage. None. Second, teen employment has fallen dramatically everywhere in the US since 2000, as our ever crappier economy has forced more and more adults into minimum wage jobs. What would the editors prefer—that a 26-year-old single mother lose her job so that her employer can pay a 16-year-old 25 percent less?

In response, Sawant said a lower minimum wage for teens means “condemning those low-wage workers to not having the best start in life.”

What’s missing from that analysis is this fact: Those earning a training wage would make slightly less than what would be the highest minimum wage of any city in the country.

And what’s missing from the Seattle Times analysis is the fact that the precedent of a training wage in Seattle would be seized upon by Republicans in Olympia (and some cheap-labor Democratic collaborators) as an opportunity to create a training wage statewide, cutting the already stagnant wages of tens of thousands of Washingtonians.

It may be an unwelcome burden to some, but Seattle’s $15 minimum wage ordinance is setting an example for the state and the nation. What we do here will surely influence what lawmakers do elsewhere. And that is what Sawant is talking about when she astutely warns that “a training wage takes it backward.”

Under Murray’s proposal, Seattle’s minimum wage would be more than $18 an hour by 2025 — $6 more than what the state minimum wage, which automatically rises with inflation, would be. Even with a subminimum wage — usually defined as 85 percent of the standard wage — teens and trainees would be making more than $15 an hour.

Okay, now the editors are just pulling numbers out of their collective ass, guessing at the training wage discount, mixing 2025 dollars with 2014 dollars in the same paragraph, and willfully inflating the inflation rate for maximum effect. By the same logic, we could just argue for leaving Seattle’s minimum wage law unchanged, because the status quo would have all workers making at least $15 an hour by 2034! Hooray!

The Seattle City Council should allow both. That would not make the council sellouts to business. It would acknowledge that Seattle is about to take off on a flight unfathomable just a year ago.

Again, it’s only “unfathomable” if you are totally out of touch with the will of Seattle voters.

Furthermore, sub-minimum teen and training wages are unacceptable to Sawant and organized labor not because they are “grumpy,” but because it would create a wage-stealing loophole big enough to drive a Walmart delivery truck through. Study after study finds that low-wage workers are routinely cheated, and these sub-minimum wage loopholes are nothing if not a recipe for cheating workers.

And finally, let’s be clear about what this teen and training wage proposal is really about. It’s not about accommodating immigrant-owned micro-businesses. It’s about destroying the delicate compromise worked out by the mayor’s Income Inequality Advisory Committee—a compromise that already takes 11 years to phase all workers in to what would be the equivalent of only $14.50 an hour in today’s dollars. Tack on a subminimum teen and training wage, and that whole deal falls apart.

Which I’m guessing is what the Seattle Times editorial board wants. Because I suppose it’s unthinkable to them that the far less business friendly $15 Now initiative could possibly pass.

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We estimate the employment effects of changes in national minimum wages using a pooled cross- section time-series data set comprising 17 OECD countries for the period 1975-2000, focusing on the impact of cross-country differences in minimum wage systems and in other labor market institutions and policies that may either offset or amplify the effects of minimum wages. The average minimum wage effects we estimate using this sample are consistent with the view that minimum wages cause employment losses among youths.

Neumark & Wascher, 2003, found in a couple of different sources, including a Fed site.

This is before the Great Recession’s effects on teen employment, as it covered a 25 year period and 17 different nations.

So, I take issue with your claim, above, that there’s no correlation between minimum wage and teen unemployment.

Insofar as compromise and whether to do so is concerned, I suppose that depends on whether you think an uncompromising initiative before voters or proposal before the City Council will pass. If you are sure it will, then there would be no reason to compromise.

She should appear (to the Times) to be as ‘grumpy’ as she likes, but it would be very nice if she didn’t always shout so loudly. It’s tough to appreciate her side of, (her rather narrow set of), issues when one has to cover one’s ears in pain.

I think that the point made in Goldy’s post about applying a training wage to a high turnover business like fast food would ensure that most hires would never receive the $15 an hr. minimum wage.

…and Travis’ point (could have been some other conservo-apologist for billionaires — they all sound alike) point that UNIONS sponsor training periods for new employees misses the crucial point that Unions afford certain protections to employees that fast food joints like McDonald’s don’t.

The training wage is just a sub-rosa effort to defang the new minimum wage law.

When I was a teenager in ’70s California, there was a training wage for adults, for the first 160 hours. It was the same as the wage for minors.

I remember being hired at a Baskin-Robbins along with two others – one was 18, one was 16, and I was 16. After 160 hours the adult, who was the worst of us three, was raised to adult minimum wage. The 16 year-olds got .05 raises.

The frequent mention everywhere of Washington State’s minimum wage being the “highest in the country” means absolutely nothing. Neither it nor any other minimum wage are living wages. You can’t live on $9+/hr, especially when those jobs are usually 30 hrs/wk or less. What Sawant (the loud talker, according to some) and others want is an hourly wage that will enable people to pay rent and buy food.

One reason for $15Now not to compromise is that the Mayor’s plan–even before the additional training wage and other takeways were added after the committee issued its plan–minimum wage workers will NEVER achieve $15/hour in future inflation-adjusted dollars. The maximum the Mayor’s plan will result in is $14.30 in today’s dollars, and that would only occur for some employees in 2025.

The spectacle of the Mayor and most CMs sucking up to business on this has not been pretty. I look forward to voting for $15Now’s much simpler and more much quickly implemented plan in November.

So what’s your point? Be 18+ and you get paid better? Baskin-Robbins was not a meritocracy? Baskin-Robbins got you to work for a month at training wages? Is your point that you were pissed that you didn’t get paid as much as some one else?

Seems to me your point is that there was little incentive to work hard when wages were low and little hope of rising. Maybe you should have unionized so you could have had some influence over the pay scale?

Jobs for teenagers paid at least minimum wage when I was growing up in Illinois during the ’70s. Many paid much more. My first job at 16 actually paid commission on top of hourly pay. Which was a lot, because it was a garden center and you were selling mature trees, plus other high price items. One high school friend worked a well paid factory job after school. Many others worked at union grocery stores.

The middle class has been decimated by big business outsourcing previously well paid jobs. A local example is Alaska Airlines dumping their union baggage handlers and contracting the work out to Menzies who pays squat (speaking of security nightmares). Nearly 5,000 workers at the airport make less than $15/hr – www pbs org/newshour/making-sense/baggage-handler-may-food-stamps/

Lack of good paying jobs means the economy is working at less than par, since the rich spend a very small part of their income compared to the rest of us.

All you cheap labor conservatives out there, y’know, I just want to say that in this New Gilded Age of soaring CEO salaries, billion-dollar-a-year hedge fund managers, and massive wealth transfers from the working and middle classes to the very very rich, all your complaints and whining about raising the wages of our lowest-paid workers should, and does, fall on DEAF EARS. To my liberal friends I say, let’s just do it already, and if business does like it … well, that’s just TOO FREAKING BAD for them. They had their day in the sun, and made the most of it. Now it’s someone else’s turn to get a sandwich and apple.

When will people acknowledge the elephant in the room, that is, that many senior citizens are working minimum wage jobs to make up for the fact that Wall Street tanked their 401ks and they cannot afford to retire? Maybe the 65 year old who is waiting another two or three years for a real SS check to kick in needs a raise too, and not just 20 somethings with $100k in student debt.

Are the Times editorialists really pulling numbers out of their ass and guessing at the training wage discount, when the percentage they are using is based in WA state law?

Under state law, 14- and 15-year-olds can be paid 85 percent of the state minimum wage. The state also can grant certificates to exempt some employers who offer apprenticeship or training programs, although very few have been issued.

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